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Articles by Mike Melanson
New to open source? Here’s everything you need to get started
Explore our simple guide to finding projects, understanding guidelines, and making an impact. January 24, 2025 | Updated January 22, 2025 | 5 minutes Share: So, you’ve heard about open source. You know it’s a great way to learn new skills, build up your resume, and give back to the developer community—but maybe you’re not sure where to begin. Getting involved in open source can raise all sorts of questions: Are there specific contribution guidelines?
Elon Musk, Twitter, and the Weaponization of Open Source
When I first sat down to write about this topic this week, my first instinct was for the entire intro to just say something along the lines of “Ugh, can we just NOT?” and then skip right into the weekly news summary. But then I heard the part about open sourcing Twitter, and my interest was piqued.
Solomon Hykes: Dagger Brings the Promise of Docker to CI/CD
For the team behind Dagger, the “portable dev kit for CI/CD pipelines” that was launched into public beta last month, the open source startup is a bit of a second act. The trio of co-founders — Solomon Hykes, Andrea Luzzardi, and Samuel Alba — all spent nearly a decade working together at Docker, the company Hykes founded before leaving in 2018.
The Promise of WebAssembly Heads to Ruby
While Ruby didn’t exactly top the list of most desired languages in the 2021 State of WebAssembly survey (that honor went to Rust, with Go and C++ following close behind), that is precisely what happened this week, nonetheless.
Atlassian’s Compass Unites Tool and Code Sprawl
The move from a monolithic software architecture to microservices means not only more moving pieces in the code base, but also tools, according to a recent survey by Atlassian. The company’s Atlassian State of Developer Survey recently found that a majority of developers polled said that the number of tools required was increasing, and with them the complexity of their position was increasing as well.
Astro Revs Up Static Sites with Partial Hydration
Over the last decade, the desire to increase interactivity on the web has led to more and more client-side JavaScript with frameworks like Angular, Vue, and React. While this trend has been a boon for developers looking to create full applications on the web, it has meant more and more JavaScript shipped to the client-side, which can bog down users with older, less powerful devices. In response, one recent trend has been to try to shift back toward server-side rendering and delivery of content.
Are Go Generics Ready for Prime Time?
As we’ve discussed numerous times over the years, developers have been anticipating the addition of generics to Go for a long time now. The feature has been the most highly requested for more than a decade now and it finally arrived just last month to much celebration with the release of Go 1.18.
Alpine.js Brings JavaScript Interactivity without Complexity to HTML
When Caleb Porzio related how he built Alpine.js during last year’s Alpine Day conference, he described it in terms of summiting and descending a “JavaScript mountain.” His ascent of JavaScript mountain began early on in his developer career with jQuery, reaching the summit, he said, when he began building single-page applications (SPAs) with Laravel and Vue.js.
GitLab’s Free Tier Belt-Tightening Continues
The fat trimming and belt-tightening over at GitLab have continued, this time with the company announcing that it would be limiting the Free tier of GitLab SaaS to five users per namespace. As with any announcement around changing costs — especially when you’re talking about something users previously got for free — there’s a good bit of consternation going around. A little over a year ago, GitLab ditched its Starter tier to the dismay of many developers.
How OSS Devs Can Take Ethical Stances without License Changes
While the Open Source Initiative’s (OSI) definition of open source software is quite clear on the matter — there must be “no discrimination against persons or groups” and “no discrimination against fields of endeavor” — the issue of who should be allowed to use open source software, according to ethical considerations, has long been debated. It is a global movement. One that builds bridges through collaboration that cross geopolitical borders. A movement disrupted by federalism.
Hyperview Brings CI/CD to Mobile Using React Native
When Instawork director of engineering Adam Stepinski joined the company in 2017, the team there was using React Native to build a cross-platform app for both Android and iOS. In between quality assurance and the app store review process, the fastest they could iterate was with a weekly release. On the web end of things, however, changes could be pushed out to users immediately, allowing more of an agile approach to development.
OWA Takes on Apple’s Browser Ban for PWA Parity
While the Chrome and Firefox icons on many iPhones may convince users otherwise, Apple has effectively , powered by WebKit, for a decade now. Those Chrome and Firefox browsers (among others) on iOS are merely skinned versions of their counterparts, built using WebKit, and lack the functionality that would otherwise differentiate them. According to the Open Web Advocacy (OWA) group, this is a purely anti-competitive move by Apple that does more than simply detract from iOS users’ experiences.
Debate in JavaScript Community Over Proposed Types Syntax
If a proposal unveiled this week gets its way, JavaScript developers will soon have something that many of them have long been asking for: a type system, of some sort at least. A blog post by TypeScript senior program manager Daniel Rosenwasser lays out the background and reasoning for the proposal for type syntax in JavaScript.
RailsConf and DHH Go Their Separate Ways
This week’s instance of a blog post that could have been an email comes from Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, also referred to as DHH.
Where Does Open Source Fit into Russia's War with Ukraine? - The New Stack
Earlier this week, open source gateway Scarf began limiting access to open source packages for Russian government and military entities, via its gateway.
Enough with the Zero Sum Game of Rust vs. Go
Enough with the Zero Sum Game of Rust vs. Go Last week, in our weekly roundup of programming-related news bits from around the web, we briefly pointed to an article published by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that touted the sustainability of the Rust programming language.
Gitpod Brings Automated Environments to JetBrains IDEs
JetBrains, the maker of more than 10 language-specific integrated development environments (IDEs), has teamed up with Gitpod, the open source platform for automated developer environments, in what they call “a long-term partnership” that will result in “a deep, technical integration between their platforms,” according to a statement.
A Tentative Well-Wishing for 20 Years of .NET
The 20th anniversary of .NET is upon us this week and with it, Microsoft is pulling out all the stops in celebration of what it says is “the most loved framework by developers for three years in a row now — , , , according to Stack Overflow’s developer survey.” First launched in 2002, .NET is, in some ways, something that Microsoft can roll out as evidence of its changed ways over the years.
Joel Spolsky on Structuring the Web with the Block Protocol
In the battle between the open web and proprietary walled gardens created by the likes of Facebook, Joel Spolsky and his HASH co-founder David Wilkinson come out decidedly on the side of the open web.
Island Brings Enterprise Controls to Web Browsers
Working in an enterprise can often mean that you use software that’s specifically designed to handle the scale and security requirements of these large businesses. In recent years, however, many software suites have moved from being offered as native desktop applications to living on the web, to be accessed via a browser.
What's Old Is New Again: JavaScript Dominance Not Assured - The New Stack
Much like how a stopped watch is right twice a day, it seems that, in the world of technology, if you just stay around long enough, the methods you knew long ago become the way to do things once again. This week, an article by Klint Finley over at GitHub’s ReadME Project tells a tale of the old becoming new again, with an exploration of all of the backend languages that are coming to the frontend.
A React Developer Chooses Rails, Igniting JavaScript Debate
What better way to end the work week than with a debate over using one technology over another? This week, the debate came in the form of a blog post by developer Vadim Demedes, who wrote about “why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs.” In the post, Demedes relates his recent experience in choosing Ruby on Rails instead of using his normal go-to, a React-based single-page application framework.
Netlify Adds Scheduled Functions with Quirrel Acquisition
Netlify, the company that brought the world the JAMstack, has taken the first steps toward providing its users with scheduled functions, with this week’s acquisition of Quirrel — an open source solution for managing and scheduling the execution of serverless functions and jobs. Netlify not only bought the company, but has hired Quirrel creator Simon Knott, who also created Blitz.js and will be joining Netlify to further build out this functionality.
Deci Releases Open Source Deep Learning Training Library
Developers looking to implement deep learning often spend too much time sorting through various open source repositories — trying to integrate tools, replicate results, and increase accuracy. In response, Deci, a deep learning development platform, has taken its expertise in these tasks and released SuperGradients.
The Time to Decide on Docker Desktop Has Arrived
It’s been five months now since Docker first announced updates to its subscription tiers and generally roiling the tech community, with some calling the move a bit of a “bait and switch“. While the subscription update made several changes, the one that caused all the commotion was the move to make Docker Desktop a paid subscription for some users.
Will 2022 Be a Golden Age for Full-Stack JavaScript?
For six years now, developer and Best of JS creator Michael Rambeau has been tracking trending projects in the JavaScript ecosystem and assembling them into his yearly JavaScript Rising Stars, which ranks projects according to stars given on GitHub during the previous twelve months. The awards are broken down into a dozen subcategories, along with an overall winner category. Rambeau summarizes the results and then offers his thoughts on the year past and the year ahead.
We've Come a Long Way Since Healthcare.gov - The New Stack
This week, the Biden administration made at-home COVID tests available to the public through a couple of websites that allow each address to order four tests, to be delivered by the United States Postal Service (USPS). For the most part, the entire affair appears to have been a success.
Bluprint Teaches Kids to Code JavaScript in the Metaverse
Bitsbox has been in the business of teaching kids how to code for the better part of a decade, and now the company is taking both its lessons and its code-teaching tools into the next level: the metaverse.
Htmx: HTML Approach to Interactivity in a JavaScript World
The debate around multipage applications (MPAs), or what you might otherwise call traditional websites, versus single-page applications (SPAs), or web applications built using frontend JavaScript frameworks such as React, has been going on for several years now. A new HTML extension framework called htmx, described as “a library that allows you to access modern browser features directly from HTML, rather than using javascript,” is hoping to shift web development away from the SPA approach.
Is Open Source Really Free if We Aren't Allowed to Break It? - The New Stack
This past week has been an interesting one in the world of open source software. As you likely have heard by now, Marak Squires, the author of two popular open source libraries — colors.js and faker.js — intentionally corrupted the two libraries, partly in the name of standing up to the man (aka “Fortune 500s”), and partly to bring awareness to his own pet conspiracy theories.
Solo.io Brings 'Docker-Like Experience' to eBPF with BumbleBee - The New Stack
Service mesh integration software provider Solo.io has released BumbleBee, a new open source project that it says “brings a Docker-like experience for eBPF to you.” In their efforts to improve performance in certain realms such as metrics, Solo.io had turned to the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) in order to “shortcut the HTTP stack,” said Solo.io CEO and founder Idit Levine.
Mozilla and the 'Planet-Incinerating Ponzi Grifters' - The New Stack
Sure, it may have actually been around seven years ago now that Mozilla started accepting cryptocurrencies as donations, but with a tweet last week reminding folks of this fact, it seems that the company has stepped into a pile of public relations doo doo. Jamie Zawinski, who credits himself as “one of the founders of Netscape and Mozilla.org,” replied to the tweet and did not mince words.
Elyra's Jupyter AI Pipelines Now Support Custom Components - The New Stack
Elyra, the artificial intelligence (AI) toolkit first released by IBM in early 2020, helps data scientists with the often difficult process of building AI pipelines. As they wrote in the tool’s introductory post, “Building an AI pipeline for a model is hard. Breaking down and modularizing a pipeline is harder.” A data pipeline can include a number of steps, some relying on others, and creating this pipeline can lie outside the core skills needed for data science.
This Year In Programming: Go, Rust, GitHub Lead 2021 Stories
Well, well, well, here we are, having careened into the final days of 2021 with nasal swabs jutting from our noses, Zoom-fatigue having morphed into something more like Zoom-existential-dread, and hopefully, a method or two in place to prevent the eternal doomscroll we perfected in 2020. We made big plans, changed big plans, pondered just how burned out we all really were, and then were later told that, worry not, we’d reverted to pre-pandemic productivity levels. It’s been a year, hasn’t it?
Funding Is Just One Piece of the Log4j Puzzle
Last week, we looked at a number of responses to the Log4j vulnerabilities, which all seemed to lead to one conclusion — a big “I told you so” regarding the effects of lack of funding in open source software. One writer called the entire situation “a perfect microcosm of all of the major ecosystem problems with ‘Open Source’ software,” while another said that the situation was an obvious example that it was time to “professionalize” the role of open source maintainer.
Hasura Brings REST APIs to GraphQL
One common narrative around application programming interfaces (APIs) these days is one of transition from REST API to GraphQL, but the reality more often than not is an in-between ground that will continue for years to come. For that reality, companies like Hasura, which offers managed cloud and enterprise versions of the Hasura GraphQL Engine open source project, now give organizations a way to enjoy the best of both worlds.
Log4j Is One Big 'I Told You So' for Open Source Communities - The New Stack
Another week, another bug that brings the internet to its knees, amirite? As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote of the bug in the open source Java logging library Apache Log4j earlier this week, we are in so much trouble.
Rust in the Linux Kernel: 'Good Enough' - The New Stack
The effort to bring Rust to the Linux kernel marches on this week, with an update from Rust for Linux project maintainer Miguel Ojeda put out this week serving as cause for renewed excitement. While the update cautions that Rust support is “still to be considered experimental,” it notes that the project has moved on from using the beta Rust compiler to use stable releases, starting with Rust 1.57.0, which was just released last Thursday.
Apptainer, a Container System for High-Performance Computing
Apptainer, the container system for high-performance computing (HPC) formerly known as Singularity, has joined the Linux Foundation with at least one stated goal, according to Apptainer founder and project lead Gregory Kurtzer, summed up like this: “cross-pollination.” “In HPC, we’ve built upon decades of research in scalable computing architectures and models.
Rust-Based Cloud Hypervisor Heads to Linux Foundation
The Cloud Hypervisor project has found a home with the Linux Foundation, bringing its modular approach to virtual machine monitoring for cloud-based workloads to the vendor-neutral foundation.
The 'Foreseeable Future' Ends with Knative's CNCF Application - The New Stack
Well, well, well — after all that, it looks like the Knative project is poised to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
JFrog Brings Artifactory On-Prem for AWS with EKS Anywhere
DevOps platform JFrog has launched a new deployment option for its Artifactory universal artifact repository at this week’s Amazon Web Services’ Re:Invent 2021 conference, bringing the service to Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere. JFrog Artifactory, explained JFrog product marketing lead Jag Mirani, serves as a database for DevOps that provides a number of assurances not provided by public repositories.
PagerDuty Automates Incident Response with Rundeck
Digital operations management company PagerDuty has released a new version of its PagerDuty Operations Cloud that introduces a new level of automation to its platform, in part due to the company’s acquisition of enterprise DevOps automation provider Rundeck.
PHP Gets a Foundation to Work on PHP Core
Given recent events, it’s perhaps less “darkly humorous” than the Wikipedia article on the idea suggests, but the theory remains the same — how many members of your current team would need to suddenly disappear to grind your organization or project to a halt? That number is known as your bus factor, as in, how many people would need to be hit by a bus for everything to stop working, and earlier this year, PHP contributor Joe Watkins argued that the bus factor for PHP was a shocking number two.
Red Hat Fills a Gap with OpenShift Data Science
Following its initial launch earlier this year, Red Hat has released Red Hat OpenShift Data Science as a “field trial”. The managed cloud service provides enterprises with an environment tailored for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) on Red Hat OpenShift.
Cloudflare Brings Stateful Data Support to CDN Platform
Content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare has given its users access to compute since it first launched its Cloudflare Workers feature in 2017. While compute at the edge can be a powerful feature, without access to stateful data, it remains limited. Now, Cloudflare has released a slate of new features that brings stateful data to its platform, whether connecting to existing databases or using the company’s Durable Objects, which just reached general availability this month.
PlanetScale Serves up Vitess-Powered Serverless MySQL
The origin story of Vitess is oft-told: by 2010, YouTube was growing so fast, its database couldn’t keep up anymore, so the company created Vitess, a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.
Rust Mod Team Resigns in Protest of 'Unaccountable' Core Team - The New Stack
This morning, the moderation team for the Rust programming language resigned effective immediately.
Apollo Does GraphQL at Scale via Contracts, New Rust Router
GraphQL tooling company Apollo announced a number of new features and products around its federated approach to GraphQL during its annual GraphQL Summit this year.
Are You Pre-Pandemic Productive Yet?
As someone who has worked remotely for the majority of the past decade, I’m certainly not the case study for productivity and last year’s sudden introduction to remote work, but when I saw the first headline about dev productivity being back to pre-pandemic levels, I had to wonder: did they get this right?
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